For many years, I was blessed to be a catechist/Bible study leader for a particular group of young people. As I cleaned out files this week, I found this list I created for them of the “Top Ten Things I Have to Say Before I Let You Go.” I think I personally still need the counsel within it; I’m sharing it here in case it speaks to you too…. //LEARN MORE

Many of your parish staff members recently consecrated their lives to Jesus through Mary, using 33 Days to Morning Glory by Fr. Michael Gaitley as a preparation guide. Fr. Anthony plans to offer this same opportunity to the parish at large in the upcoming year. We highly recommend it! In the meantime, here’s a Marian prayer I wrote in the chapel. It’s meant to be prayed in two directions – all the blue words first, and then starting over with the blue and rose together. I pray it blesses you somehow…. //LEARN MORE

Because someone asked me about it, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the puzzle of Fear of the Lord. As most of us probably know, Fear of the Lord is a gift of the Holy Spirit – the list of which can be found in the Old Testament, in Isaiah 11:2-3. At first glance, this Fear may not seem to be as sweet as the other gifts: Wisdom, Understanding, Fortitude, Piety, Counsel, and Knowledge. And it may especially seem to be contradicted by Jesus’ frequent insistence that we fear not – a command that I have been told (though I have not personally counted) is given 365 times in the New Testament, once for every day of the year. So what gives? I think the key lies in recognizing just who God is…. //LEARN MORE

Pentecost is quite possibly my favorite day of the church year. Is it yours? Should it be? Strangely enough, many of us somehow have not yet learned the rich history of the celebration, nor recognized its proclamation of a present and a future absolutely saturated with dynamic, divine life.

The word Pentecost is from the Greek for “fiftieth.” If you start with the celebration of the Easter vigil and count out 50 days, you’ll land on Pentecost. But that’s not when the party first got started, 50 days after Jesus’ actual resurrection. Instead, Pentecost was first celebrated by the faithful as a renewal of the covenant God made with Noah. Later, the Jewish feast shifted focus to the life-changing gift of another covenant: The Ten Commandments. No wonder so many people of different languages were gathered in Jerusalem on that day! And what wonderful reasons they had to rejoice together!… //LEARN MORE

I’m a gal who just loves to check things off my to-do list, and also one who derives a lovely inverted sense of achievement by surrendering my to-dos to the Lord. (“Ta-da! Look what He did!”) It can be a frustration, then, when I assess my attempts to evangelize, because I always feel like the results fall way short of the goal. Has that been your experience too? In conversation with a mentor, I recently realized that many (if not all) truly effective evangelizers feel the same way. The reasons make sense.